This is why great movies shouldn’t have sequels. Make no mistake, Iron Man was a great movie. It took a character from the depths of obscurity and made him a national symbol. Sure it was a comic book movie, but it had more heart and more flare than a lot of more serious films. The story of a man totally absorbed in himself and his own pleasure being changed and using his power to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves was truly inspiring, led by a truly gifted actor. The action, while limited in quantity, was excellent in quality.
How do you follow an act like that? Well, at the command of the almighty dollar, Marvel Studios had to try. To be fair, what they came up with is watchable, in fact clearly a better sequal than their colossal disappointments of Spiderman 2 and X2: X-Men United, but it has none of the power of Iron Man.
The scene in Iron Man where Stark rescues the villagers from the Ten Rings is a scene I’ll probably never forget. It took two thirds of the movie to get to Stark’s first heroics as Iron Man, but it was well worth it.
If you’re thinking that, now that we have the origin story out of the way, we’ll get some extra action and heroics, think again. Marvel has to cram in more subplots and implausible characters to eat up time. Well, that’s not so bad, you say, more plot development is good, right?
Not when the writers are used to writing for comic books. Comic books have room for stories that go in circles, whereas movies simply don’t. For example, in part 2, Stark finds out that he’s dying due to the effects of the reactor core he built in part 1. Precious time for action sequences disappears forever while he remodels his workshop to build a machine and creates some “new element†that was supposedly impossible to create through a process the movie never even tries to explain. This new element magically cures his ailment and everything goes back to normal, so it doesn’t even drive the story. If I were to read through a decade’s worth of monthly comic book issues, I would expect some filler crap like this, but for a movie, it’s just wrong.
Similarly, after Stark seemed to have gotten a new set of priorities in part 1, in part 2, we get more of him staggering drunkenly, driving sports cars, and trying to score. When someone turns over a new leaf, is it unreasonable to expect them to never relapse? Probably. But that’s not the point. Why are we paying to watch the same stuff over?
Unlike comic serials, which are expected to keep a story going perpetually, a movie can, and should, present a coherent story that stands on its own and doesn’t waste time with filler. Judging by the buzz among nerds over the past few years, and by the easter eggs in both Iron Man movies, Marvell plans on changing this. Iron Man 2 is actually set-up for movies about Thor and the Avengers (who include Iron Man). In other words, Marvell plans on making movies more like comic books, written not so much to entertain as to advertise the next movie and keep you coming back for more. This might score with the hardcore comic nerds, but I doubt the general public will tolerate it for long.
I should probably say that Iron Man 2 is not horrible, and is even kind of entertaining if you turn your brain off. I’m sure there will be a third one, and I’ll probably see it. After all, both Spiderman and X-Men made improvements with their third installments. Once Iron Man 2 is out on video, it won’t be a bad way for you to kill two hours.
Bruce Willis has spent a lot of his career kicking in doors, but I bet this is the first time he’s had to do it just to get his wife out of bed. Surrogates is a disturbing story of man kind’s dependence on technology and susceptibility to control by fear.  In the not-too-distant future, mid-Sunday A.D., 98% of all humans live vicariously through life-like robots. They lie in chairs that look like the offspring of a La-Z-Boy and a virtual reality entertainment center (“stem chairs”), and rarely leave their homes. Their work, and all other interaction, is done by their “surrogates,†androids connected to their brain stems.
For years we have been hearing about the great leader John Connor. Â Even before he was onscreen we heard about him in the original Terminator. Â In T2 he was a petulant upstart with a whole lot of potential for channeling his angst into world-saving charisma. Â T3 showed a JC who was more like the whiny Anakin Skywalker of Episode II, but ended with the seeds of humanity’s savior finally beginning to take root. Â In T4, our fabled hero is nowhere to be found for much of the movie. Â Instead we are treated to another petulant upstart, a survivalist woman who thinks she is in a Resident Evil movie, and a young girl who cannot talk (can anyone say 
